A seven-year dancing drought was officially quenched Monday evening at the Wilson Center with a sharp burst of cheers and — of course — a few exuberant mini dance moves.

The Tulane women’s basketball team received the No. 12 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s Sacramento Regional of the bracket. The Green Wave will play No. 5 seed Georgia (23-8, 9-7 SEC) on Saturday in the first round at approximately 8:40 p.m. at Arizona’s Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe, Ariz., site of the first two rounds. The last time Tulane received a berth was 2003.

But there wasn’t much suspense with this one. Tulane snatched an automatic bid Friday by winning the Conference USA Tournament championship game against UAB. And there wasn’t much suspense to find out where, when and who the Green Wave would face when it came to Monday’s tournament selection show.

It took only about five minutes into the show - aired live on a Wilson Center flat screen television in the atrium filled with boosters, a smattering of student-athletes and administrators. The Green Wave women’s basketball team, clad in gray and white Conference USA champion baseball caps, and Coach Lisa Stockton leapt to their feet with an abrupt, universal scream when Tulane’s name was called.

“I wasn’t expecting us to be the third (matchup) to get up there, but it was up and we know who we are playing and now we just have to be prepared and ready, ” said Tiffany Aidoo, who prepped at Northshore.

It marks the 10th NCAA bid for Stockton and Tulane.

“It feels great, ” Stockton said minutes after hearing the news. “This is our third (conference) championship since Katrina, but getting to this level, getting to the NCAA for me personally, I feel Katrina is behind us. This is the step we had to make to make sure there is no looking back and that we could put that part of our lives behind us.”

The moment was especially poignant for senior Chassity Brown, who knows what it is like to sit through a selection show without hearing your team’s name announced. The Green Wave won the regular-season title her freshman year but got snubbed by the selection committee.

Brown couldn’t help but contrast that disappointment with Monday night’s high.

“It’s just a great feeling, ” Brown said. “I’m a senior, so what senior wouldn’t want to go out like this? It’s a great experience. My freshman year when we were supposed to make the tournament and we didn’t, we were kind of disappointed about that.“

Though neither Stockton nor the players knew many specifics about Georgia immediately after the pairings were announced, the Lady Bulldogs come from a conference (the SEC) the Green Wave well knows. Tulane played then-No. 7-ranked LSU in New Orleans on Nov. 25, taking the Tigers to overtime before losing 73-65.

“That was a big game for us, obviously we lost the game in overtime, but you would have thought we won the game by how happy everybody was, by how excited we were to know that we could actually play with an SEC team, ” Brown said. “We had doubt at first when you are coming into a team with the great legacy of LSU and how they’ve been doing through the years, so when Tulane came out and we were playing and we took them to overtime and we lost, we knew that we had something special on this team.”

The Green Wave sustained major injuries to key players from there - including losing returning leading scorer Brittany Lindsey six games into the schedule with a season-ending shoulder injury. Brown later broke her hand and returned within a week in pain, but willing to do anything to get back on the court.

Tulane circled its wagons, regrouping to win both the regular season and league tournament titles while four players finished the regular season averaging double-digit scoring if you include Lindsey’s stats.

“The biggest challenges have been the injuries that we faced the entire season, ” Aidoo said. “People had to come out and play different positions and people have stepped up. This team is a balanced team and that really helped us a lot. We don’t really have one go-to player, and that really hurts our opponents as well because it is hard for them to stop.”

Conference USA’s poor RPI and the lack of a Green Wave megastar might have worked against Tulane getting a top-10 seed. But Stockton and the players are happy to play spoiler. Fourth-seeded Oklahoma State (23-10) and No 13 seed Chattanooga (24-8) is the other pairing in Tempe.

“I certainly think we’ve had a great season, ” Stockton said. “Whether we are better than a 12 (seed) — I would think so. (But) at this point everybody is playing well going into the tournament and we just need to get ready to play. Georgia is a great opponent out of the SEC with a lot of tradition. We’ve got to be ready to play. One of the good things about the bracket is there is not a home team in that bracket. That is one thing we were hoping for is to not play on someone’s home floor. If anything that is the greatest positive out of it.”